I’ve been in both states recently, and talk to relatives there all the time. The environment there is no more hostile to Democrats than it’s ever been — in fact, it’s probably better than usual. North Dakota is in the midst of an energy boom and experiencing the lowest unemployment rate in the nation, with South Dakota having the second lowest. Pomeroy and Herseth have twice the cash on hand as their opponents. Both are facing little-known state legislators, and both won their last couple of races by 60/40 margins.
Off-year elections in red states are always tough for Democratic House members, but I’ll be very surprised if Pomeroy or Herseth has real trouble dispatching their opponents. Early polls of voters in R+9 and R+10 states is an easy way to drive a “wave” narrative, and Rasmussen got what he wanted when he polled South Dakota and North Dakota.
Mike in NC
About as credible as Frank Luntz.
Kirk Spencer
A while back, Nate Silver also noticed another interesting Rasmussen characteristic. He quit polling races about three or four weeks prior to their conclusions.
Basically, that meant there was no validation or testing of Rasmussen’s point spreads. The fact that so many races became “closer” might not be his company bias but might be due to other factors. (/sarcasm)
Linda Featheringill
So maybe I should ignore Rasmussen.
I have taken to ignoring several sources of information and analysis because I think they are really slanted and might not be telling the whole truth. This withdrawal has increased my contentment level.
The problem is, I worry that at some point I will be closed off from so much that I have a skewed picture of reality.
Much of my inner life has been devoted to a search for the truth and shutting the door on possible sources of information would not help that quest.
What are we to do?
Corner Stone
The unemployment rate is so low in both states primarily due to their independence from big government.
beltane
We laugh at Karl Rove’s “The Math” now, but when he first said it there were quite a lot of people at DKos and elsewhere who let themselves be spooked. Rassmussen is part of the GOP’s mind-fucking empire; they exist to drive the narrative and spook rank-and-file Democrats.
I take this to mean that Mike Castle’s seat in Delaware is a likely Dem pick-up, otherwise we’d be hearing more about the race.
beltane
@Linda Featheringill: You don’t have to ignore Rassmussen; you have to learn to read their tea leaves the right way. It is similar to Kremlin-watching in the old days in that what is not polled is more important than what is polled.
Odie Hugh Manatee
With the Repubs, appearance is everything in promoting their Grand Illusion. Facts? Who needs them when your goal is to advance your political agenda rather than actually provide useful and accurate analysis. Reality? Who needs it when you can create your own. Rasmussen stats are nearly worthless until an election is about two weeks out. All they really do is try and enhance the repub positions prior to those last two weeks by influencing public perceptions. Funny thing is that much of the public perception is based on reporting from our shitty M$M.
It’s a tag team that’s hard to beat.
woody45
It started early 2009 when Charlie Cook told them Dems were going to lose the 2010 midterms. I thought Kos and others would have seen through that. I was wrong.
beltane
@Odie Hugh Manatee: Have you ever been polled by Rassmussen? Their issues polling is so incredibly biased that I wonder how they don’t get 98% support for GOP positions. They are that bad.
dmsilev
@beltane: DE-Sen is also worth watching, largely because a Teabagger is going after Castle in the primary.
dms
FlipYrWhig
@woody45: Kos cares a lot about confirming his sense of outsider grievance and his superiority to the Democratic consultant class. It’s better for him if there’s a crisis, because that way he can say that the crisis would have been averted if the poor benighted, hidebound souls at Democratic HQ had only listened to him.
jwb
Yet, like the useful idiot that he so often plays, Nate continues not only to include Rassmussen in his own analysis but to defend their polling.
ETA: why is it that the left has not put together a polling outfit the equivalent of Rassmussen to push its line?
Frank
Most rational people know that FoxNews is a GOP propaganda outlet. The nail in the coffin came when it was discovered that they had donated $1 Million to the GOP.
I wonder when most rational people will also realize that Rasmussen is part of the GOP propaganda machine.
Hopefully one day the Dems will also have their own propaganda outlet with a fake polling source who can help drive the narrative.
MAJeff
@Corner Stone:
Umm, have you ever been to North Dakota? Are you aware of the role of the military in many parts of the state? How about the Bank of North Dakota. Yup, we have a state-owned bank–socialism on the Prairie.
Oil is why we haven’t collapsed like other places. North Dakota is now the fourth largest oil producing state in the country. The housing crash didn’t hit us because there was no reason to build houses (ND was the only state to lose population over the Twentieth Century) until the boom, and the boom is still going on.
General Stuck
There is a wave of sorts for the wingers, which historically has usually been the case for mid terms like this one with the minority party doing well. But it is getting obscene, the shameless media push to make it a Tsunami with breathless reports of democrats being nothing short of Satan in voters eyes. In the south, this is largely true, as it was on election day 08, but in other areas, not so much, and Obama maintains an approximate 50 50 split for approval nationwide. An example of media spin.
Analysts like Jim Vandaheigh, the news grifter extraordinaire, who hasn’t met a false meme yet he wasn’t willing to push for the wingnuts.
And big brain, Nancy Cordes
We’ve been hearing. We have heard.
From blue dogs no doubt, and claiming anyone but blue dogs complaining they didn’t want to deal with Health Care Reform, is a liar, or a fool, or both. I usually don’t give the media a lot of credit these days in influencing our politics that much. They once did, but everything now a days is diluted into a cacophony of so many outlets. But when it becomes a sort of focused mania to declare the election over and the repubs new rulers of the realm, it has to have an impact.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@Corner Stone: You mean like the Ellsworth Air Force base in South Dakota?
jwb
@General Stuck: The whole point of these polls is to sow dissension among Dems, to drive wedges into the coalition, and to depress turnout of Dem voters. From the conservative perspective, these polls and the media narratives they give rise to can cause intense fracturing in the coalition, so that the Dems are attacking each other rather than the goopers. You can see this happening right now, where we should all be training our guns on the goopers but are instead blasting each other. I’ve sworn off saying anything bad about a Democrat until after the election.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@dmsilev: Don’t you get the anti-Christine O’Donnell ads all over the page? And they are all over the web.
JAHILL10
@FlipYrWhig: Bingo. During the 2008 primaries and election season I went to D-Kos for information all the time. Now, not so much. His frontpagers spend all their time flogging the admnistration for not being enough something and the diarists go off on days-long meta rants every week. I just want to grab the whole site by the shirt front and yell, “Get over yourselves, people. There’s work to be done!”
Odie Hugh Manatee
@beltane:
If you are looking to push a certain POV then how you ask a question is much more important than the actual nature of a specific question. We get polled here all of the time and I have to laugh at some of the bullshit they try to pass off as legit polling. Sometimes I just bite my tongue and answer contrary to what they are pushing for and other times I can’t help but burst out laughing at the purposing of a particular line of questioning.
I hope Nate doesn’t get assimilated by the borg now that he’s at the NYT. He provides a valuable service and I would hate to see that ruined.
beltane
@General Stuck: Our media deserves to be impeached. Their unchaste love for the GOP is something no one should have to witness in a public forum. It does not feel like 1994 out there (Obama’s approval #s are quite a bit higher than Clinton’s at this point), but the media will do anything to put the GOP back in power so they can perform their favorite activity, which is to kiss the arse of powerful Republicans.
Linda Featheringill
@beltane:
Aha.
And that might apply to other sources as well probably.
Good. I was afraid of turning into a left-leaning Teatard. :-)
jwb
@beltane: Yes, you also have to learn to read their questions in terms of what they are asking about, which questions they are putting pressure on, and what issues they are ignoring. On the other hand, they are so clearly a propaganda outfit, I don’t know why anyone on the left takes them seriously as a polling firm. Yet there they are incorporated into pretty much everybody’s trend polls.
General Stuck
@jwb: It is the height of black comedy to me, that on the one hand, the plutocrats and their media and wingnut/conservadem lackeys have called out the dogs of pol warfare, and are at defcon 2 to stop the Obamunist, while our professional left claims the corporatist fluffer O has sold us out to the plutocrats. A circle of mad hattery. Some days I ask myself why bother.
beltane
@JAHILL10: It doesn’t help that they have added Chris Bowers to the front page. I’m sure he’s a nice person, but he has a tendency to be just as consistently wrong as the worst of the beltway bloviators. The only difference is that it takes him 5x the number of words to achieve this level of wrongness.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@jwb:
That’s the GOP plan for winning; depress Democratic and independent voting by any and all means necessary. Strange that we have a political party whose primary plan for success depends on depressing citizen participation in the electoral process.
curious
@General Stuck:
have these unnamed congressional democrats really managed to convince reporters that health care was just an item “on the president’s agenda” and not a core part of the democratic platform?
Corner Stone
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
Read your sentence again. Doesn’t it kind of speak to your concern?
General Stuck
@Odie Hugh Manatee: And you know what, it is clear that the wingnuts are favored now, with a platform consisting entirely of more tax cuts and repealing universal health care. And declarations that Obama may not be Christian, or Christian enough.
Corner Stone
@Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle: Doesn’t count as we all know that military aren’t jobs.
jwb
@Odie Hugh Manatee: I suspect you will see Nate pushing back less frequently against mainstream media sources than he has occasionally done. On the other hand, even on his old site, he was generally too accommodating of pollsters such as Rassmussen. I know he feels he can compensate for their house bias, and I’m sure on the narrow question of the poll result he’s interested in he’s right; but he doesn’t seem to recognize just how he dependent he himself is on Rassmussen, and how that dependence is shaping what he sees. My sense is that Nate’s analysis would actually be material improved if he dropped Rassmussen.
beltane
@curious: I think it’s more like the reporters were convinced that health care was just another item on the president’s agenda and they scrounged around until they found random, unnamed congressional Democrats who would confirm their beliefs.
Omnes Omnibus
OT: A piece of good news.
General Stuck
@curious: More like the reporters have sought out the minority of dems who voted against HCR, in order to fuel their dem party discord angle over Obama and dem congress leaders. It’s all about selling narratives these days. And nothing much else.
edit – or what beltane said
jwb
@General Stuck: “Some days I ask myself why bother.” And that’s exactly what the goopers want you to be asking yourself.
Corner Stone
@Omnes Omnibus: Link broken. You fix.
General Stuck
@jwb: But I keep bothering, what the hell else we gonna do?
jwb
@General Stuck: Sort of like how the NY Times rounding up a couple of students a few days ago to testify to the “fact” that the youth vote was turning gooper.
jwb
@General Stuck: Oh, yes, I know. I keep bothering too. It’s just that one of the major goals of the gooper media strategy is to sow disaffection. I’m very curious though why we are so susceptible to falling for it.
JAHILL10
@curious: Yeah, the unmitigated arrogance of the man, actually taking action on one of his key campaign promises! You’d think the American people had elected him based upon what he said he would do.
Do these idiots ever listen to themselves?
GregB
Are we talking about noted rightwing hack and GOP cruise guest, all around shill and Republican narrative setter Scottie Rasmussen?
Omnes Omnibus
@Corner Stone: Let’s try this then.
Omnes Omnibus
@JAHILL10:
This question, she is rhetorical, no?
Corner Stone
@Omnes Omnibus: I stripped out the extra http the first time. But my concern was for fellow BJ’ers and future historians who study this site in an attempt to understand how it all came to this.
JAHILL10
@Omnes Omnibus: Mais oui!
Frank
@General Stuck:
Yes, Obama could have done what Clinton did, ie pass on HCR. Yes, that worked out so well in the 1994 mid-terms, didn’t it? The Dems lost 55 seats then.
I’m not sure what is worse, the corrupted politicans, the voters who have a worse memory than a gnat or the media which is utterly clueless.
Omnes Omnibus
@Corner Stone: Your efforts on behalf of posterity are noted.
Kirk Spencer
@jwb:
The reason is that there are basically two Rasmussens, but everyone wants to pretend there’s one.
One is a Republican partisan professional, who writes biased question polls and who uses biased filters for ‘likely voter’ models that between them push the narrative that the Republican is where all the cool kids are going. The other Rasmussen is much less biased, using good questions and a lighter thumb on the scale to give results that, while still leaning R, give the customers a good view of where they stand.
The trick is to figure out which Rasmussen got any particular job. Usually, the wider the voter pool and the closer to the actual election, the more likely it is the poll went to the reputable guy. Otherwise it’s in the hands of the hack. But again that’s usually, and sometimes one or the other will grab a job to confuse those trying to figure him out.
Corner Stone
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m nothing if not concerned for posterity.
Ask anybody.
FlipYrWhig
@Frank: The Democrats who are bitching to the media are the reason why policy that would be liberal enough to satisfy us in the blogosphere never comes to pass. There are A LOT of them.
SiubhanDuinne
Cornerstones are generally all about posterity, what with the dates and names of the mayors and architects and all.
Omnes Omnibus
@SiubhanDuinne: Yeah, but yesterday Corner Stone claimed to be nothing if not agreeable. I am starting to become suspicious.
SiubhanDuinne
@Omnes Omnibus: Wait, Corner Stone claims to have an agreeable posterior?
Omnes Omnibus
@SiubhanDuinne: I most assuredly did not say that. Corner Stone may, or may not, claim such a thing, but I am not a party or witness to any such claims.
Anya
@Omnes Omnibus: Do you think this proposal has a chance of passing? Maybe It’ll focus the discussions on jobs but I highly doubt it will pass.
Omnes Omnibus
@Anya: I have my doubts that it will pass before the election. I do think, however, that it will help put the focus on jobs and the fact that Democrats are interested in creating them while Republicans are interested regain Congress in order to investigate and harass the President. I think that is a helpful distinction to bring to the front.
Socraticsilence
Never forget the media treated a 60% President like he was on the verge of resignation, then proceded to treat a 33% guy like he was Colussus upon the earth, now they treat a 45% President like he’s in the mid-to-low 30s (or as its known to Political Scientists- Bush’s good days).
lol
@JAHILL10:
You sound like an Obama-bot who drank the Kool-Aid.
GOTV is a sucker’s game – blogging is where the real activism takes place in the 21st century!
lol
@beltane:
Chris Bowers: Obama Campaign Post-Mortem
It is ironic, really. During 2006 and early 2007, I always thought that the netroots would end up being the downfall of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. However, it turns out that losing the netroots has been the downfall of Barack Obama’s campaign, resulting in the rise of Hillary Clinton. We did determine the outcome, just not in the way I expected. I think we should have seen it coming, but the future is always hard to predict. While it is disappointing, it doesn’t really make me sad. Hopefully, at the very least, the downfall of Obama’s campaign will serve as a warning to anyone else in the Democratic Party who wants to harness the activism of the netroots to win, but who distances him or herself from the netroots in order to look palatable to the establishment. You can’t throw us under the bus and expect us to still support you forever. If you throw us under the bus, well, there are better things we can do with our lives then continue to support you.
Obama ignored the Netroots and won the nomination and Presidency without them — They’re still throwing a hissy-fit over it.
Bulworth
I was in (western) South Dakota for the first time over the Labor Day weekend.
I saw only a few a political signs, none indicating which Party the candidate belonged to. I only recognized the Republican congressional candidate because the seat is an at-large one and I know Steph Hersheth is running as the Dem. I didn’t see any signs for Hersheth.
I also didn’t see any teabagger billboards, as I had in Indiana the week before.